A classical charter school preserved after Republican-backed candidates took over the local school board just posted the top state test scores in the district. Students at Merit Academy, a 3-year-old K-11 public school that opens its 12th grade in 2025, also posted the best scores among the four districts that families in the Woodland Park exurb of Colorado Springs can choose from under open enrollment.
Hopefully, others will follow.
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While test scores scratch the surface of student and school academic quality, these do help vindicate Teller County parents dissatisfied with extended school lockdowns, an increase in screen-based schooling, and creeping politicization of taxpayer-provided education. Due to these frustrations, this group of parents started a new public classical school in 2021 and took over their school board that fall to keep Merit open and growing. Merit nearly doubled in size the year after that. Charter schools are public schools run by independent boards that can be closed if students perform poorly.
Merit Academy of Woodland Park, Colorado, opened on Aug. 23 in a buoyant ceremony featuring American flags and a teenage rider riding a dun horse while waving the school flag.
The new public school went from idea to reality in just one year, opening K-8 with plans to grow into high school. As a classical school, it offers a low-screen, high-relationship environment and a focus on creative and critical thinking through careful attention to classic works and traditional approaches to math and science. These are things parents wanted that weren’t available through the Woodland Park School District, which, like many in the nation, has become computer-centered over the last several years.
“Our mentors said, ‘You’re crazy, you can’t get this done in a year.’ We said, ‘Oh yeah, watch us,'” said Merit Academy founding board member John Dill, a retired Air Force Space Command lieutenant colonel who now works as a U.S. military contractor.
Dill and his wife are so committed to the concept of a great public school accessible to all in their community that they stopped homeschooling their twin eighth-grade daughters for it. So did others on their board, some hired as Merit teachers, and some who have enrolled their kids. The school offers Friday classes and other programming to homeschoolers as part-time students.
Homeschooling was working perfectly well for his family, Dill said, they just felt they could do more than take care of their own education needs — they could also help others. As patriots, they needed to.
“I’m a rural kid from the mountains of Maine looking at the rural kids in the mountains of Colorado and saying, ‘This isn’t right, they need to be educated too,'” Dill said. “If our nation is ever to get better, we need better schools.”
RE: The opposition to better schools.
One of Merit’s challenges is also a strength: Woodland Park’s remoteness and small size. The town of 7,800 sits in Teller County, with a population of 25,000. It’s adjacent to Pike’s Peak and nearly surrounded by 1.1 million acres of Pike National Forest.
Another obstacle Merit’s board and families also hope will come around is the local school board, which denied their application for opening as a charter school. Charters are independently run public schools, and in Colorado they have to get permission to operate from their local district, a common roadblock for charter formation.
Computer-heavy learning made school a struggle for Mary Sekowski’s eighth-grade son, Nolan, even before lockdowns: “You get a group of middle school boys together and they’re supposed to be on their Chromebooks watching YouTube videos on the solar system, they’re going to goof off,” she said. “So they goof off and they get in trouble.” While computer-driven instruction might be a great fit for some kids, her social son has been coming alive with the class discussions that the teachers facilitate at Merit, she says.
The online platform WPSD schools use, called Summit, is also politically controversial. It is funded by leftist billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and has been dogged with privacy, politicization, and screen-time concerns from parents nationwide. Keeping politics out of school is also important to many families who have chosen Merit.
“Elsewhere there is a lot of politics and the deciding of the classes and the curriculum,” said board president Nicole Waggoner. “People up here are sick of that. You have a community with a certain set of values that don’t feel like their values are being represented in their kids’ educational choices.”
The existing school district has now given permission to the school board and others involved in launching the new school.
Success
The graph below, which Merit Academy Headmaster Gwynne Pekron sent to parents, teachers, and staff last week, shows the classical school’s test scores at No. 1 compared to the Woodland Park School District, Manitou Springs, Park County, Colorado Springs Early College, and Colorado Springs District 11.
Merit’s high schoolers — it had no eleventh grade in 2024 — also outperformed the state averages on the PSAT, a college entrance prep exam.
“We are extremely proud of these results and the work they represent, but aren’t done striving for improvement by a long shot,” Merit Academy founding board member John Dill told The Federalist.
In 2023, teachers unions vociferously targeted the Woodland Park school board and managed to narrow its conservative majority. The contest gained hostile national media coverage from activists at NBC who support showing children transgender pornography. The local city council is attempting to remove approximately 10 percent of the district’s income, and the police were called on a board member’s wife after conservatives decided to contest and win school board posts for the first time in 16 years.
Takeaway
The school board majority has publicly pledged support for high student achievement and parent choice at all Woodland Park schools. It points to Merit as an example of the effectiveness of their leadership on behalf of all local taxpayers and students. The board has raised teacher pay by 16 % in the last three years and instituted performance-based raises.
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